One of the poorest states in India with about five per cent of the national population, Orissa accounts for almost 62% of all malarial deaths in India. The use of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) for the prevention of malaria has been known to reduce related morbidity in other parts of the world. Unfortunately however, ITN adoption rates remain low in the state.

The Centre for Microfinance (CMF) in Chennai is implementing a research project in collaboration with an CSO-MFI partner, Bharat Integrated Social Welfare Agency (BISWA), in Orissa and Professors Alessandro Tarozzi from Duke University and Aprajit Mahajan from Stanford University. The project will explore alternative sustainable mechanisms for the adoption and continued usage of ITNs among poor households. It will then evaluate its impact not only on health outcomes, but also on crucial socio-economic indicators such as child schooling and adult economic activity.

An important aim of this project is to relax credit constraints for the purchase of ITNs among the poor. Through BISWA, poor households will have the option of taking loans to purchase the ITNs and for periodic retreatment of the nets as well. CMF can then evaluate whether such interventions can be scaled up to cover larger populations in a financially sustainable manner and also infer the existence and extent of a willingness to pay for the product.

There also exists an alternative, albeit more expensive net technology (the three-five year long lasting ITN) that does not require regular retreatment. However, the fact is that these nets are costly and their benefits need to be weighed accurately. An experimental evaluation that uses microcredit to issue such nets to a treatment sample will be useful in assessing the financial viability of such products as well as measuring their benefits relative to the conventional ITNs.